BIOS Problems after Removing Hard Drive

[numark]

For a few months I've had two hard drives connected to my computer, a WD Caviar 15GB and a WD Protege 20GB, set as master and slave respectively. I took the Caviar out, and set the Protege to master.

After booting up, however, the system freezes at the "Detecting IDE Devices..." step, and after about 2 minutes finally finds the single drive. However, it then freezes permanently at the screen just before loading Windows (it never shows "Loading Windows 98..." so it's not even getting to the bootstrap loader yet).

I've tried setting it to slave, switching which connector on the cable it's hooked up to, and clearing the BIOS to no avail. If I add the Caviar back in, it boots up fine. However, I don't want the Caviar to have to be in there anymore . Does anyone out there know what might be causing this problem? If it matters, I'm using a Shuttle AK31A (KT266A chipset). TIA!

 

[Viper96720]

was the os loaded on the caviar? Try a format and reinstall the os.

 

[bozo1]

Does that drive have a jumper setting for 'single'? If so, set it to that. Current WD models often cause that problem if they are alone on the cable and jumped for 'master' instead of 'single'.

 

[LazyBastard]

In windows, only the boot partition needs to be set as an active partition. When you add a second hard drive, windows will recognize any partitions on it that are not active, as long as they're not boot partitions. I'll bet any money that the first partition on your Protege is not set active.
You need to put the Caviar back in, and boot from it, or boot from a floppy, then use fdisk to set the first partition on the Protege to active.

 

[numark]

Originally posted by: bozo1
Does that drive have a jumper setting for 'single'? If so, set it to that. Current WD models often cause that problem if they are alone on the cable and jumped for 'master' instead of 'single'.

That was it Thank you very much, that problem was driving me nuts for so long!